Here in Washington State, our state constitution forbids any bill that has more than one subject. Two recent very controversial bills here were revoked in the past few years (with a total of 4 subjects). This restriction has been a huge help to the sanity of the government here (the bills were not only in blatant violation of that aspect of the constition, but were extremely anti-tax and would have effectively crippled the government had they remained in effect).
KDE has got all the basics down
on
Five Years of KDE
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· Score: 0, Flamebait
KDE has got all the basics down
Personally, I prefer Gnome because, despite a lack of some of the "basics", it is much more customizable to my needs. For example, in KDE, I can't rearrange the key mappings to launch a terminal when I press C-A-t. Also, despite what a lot of people claim, KDE is still very much more unstable than Gnome - the panel dissappeared on me twice last time I started a KDE session, and I had to log out to restore it.
Sorry to bitch, but it just seems like while KDE is generally a lot prettier than others, some of the advanced "basics" - the basics that I, as a person who runs Linux and a power user - expect are not there yet. It's too much like Windows or Mac for my taste: it looks pretty and tries to do everything for you.
You're absolutely right that it will not *stop* crime from happening - there is no way anything the government does is going to stop someone from robbing a bank unless they have some kind of electric field around the bank that reads the ID cards shocks any felons who try to enter. But, theoretically at least, this *would* help them track the criminals when they renew their drivers license or go through a border crossing, or any other time like that.
I don't have a problem with the idea of a national ID card. If you want privacy, then you're pretty much out of luck in the US because, like previous posters have pointed out, every time you go to a bank, show your drivers license, or use a credit card, or even every time you sign on to your MSN or AOL, somebody somewhere is tracking you.
The problem I have is that, considering that there is nothing stopping the government from keeping tight tabs on anyone and everyone using current technology/infrustructure, why do we need to go through the extra trouble, time, and money to implemenent a whole new card? Why can't they just use the existing state ID card, Social Security, or passport databases?
You're right, and I believe for "nearer" objects, like those within our own galaxy, astronomers mostly use a technique where they measure the angle of the object in the sky twice - one half year apart so that, since we know the size of the earth's orbit, they can basically use the pathagorean theorum and calculate the distance.
Again, IANAAstronomer (which is probably why I can't even recall the name of that technique:).
Who says those are necessary to support the big bang? Aspects of quantum mechanics and all sorts of other phenomena, not to mention the effort to marry Relativity and Quantum mechanics, require a new "whacky" theory.
It is by observing the doplar shift, or "red shift", in the wavelength of a stars light that the length to almost every distant object is measured.
Think of yourself as being on the surface of an expanding baloon: relative to other objects that are close to you on the surface, you are moving very slowly. Relative to objects at the center of the baloon or halfway around the surface, you are moving a little faster (remember this is as the crow flies). Relative to objects clear on the other side of the baloon, you are moving the fastest of all.
On the scale of the universe, objects on the other side of the galaxy are moving extremely fast (relative to you). I'm not sure exactly how fast, but I remember reading somewhere that it is getting close to the speed of light (after all, they have had to cover a huge amount of space to get so far away). This is easily fast enough to have an affect on the wavelength of the light - even a small relative speed will have a small (but probably unmeasurable affect).
IANAAstroPhysicist, so whether this explains the visibly red shift (since scientific spectrographs are much more sensitive than our eyes ), I cannot say. Another explaination might be that the stars are young and therefore cool, but I couldn't say that for sure either.
Before I moved on to a full time job, I used to administer my highschool's network in my free time (yes I was a major nerd). We had one PII 400 running Linux and the network for 1700 people, samba shares used by 200 computers in classrooms and such, email accounts used by all the teachers, and free PHP webspace for anyone who wanted it. All this and it never hiccupped.
Then when a the motherboard failed (ouch), we had to move the whole server to a Pentium 200 with 96MB RAM, and it still worked fine.
The year after I graduated, the Seattle school district took over network ops and installed 4 monster NT machines to do the same job, minus the free email (which is handled by another server farm off-site) and the webspace (too much liability). Downtime: probably 25% (I still talk to friends who go there). Whereas my Linux box had an uptime of 135 days at one point before the hardware failure.
Bottom line, scoff at all the admins here at my new job that want NT everywhere. It doesn't work! The thing is that it's usually easier to get a basic system running NT than with Linux, but getting a real system working properly is much harder.
You're right - but a good system still has multiple users and you still should run your everyday apps in an unprivilaged mode (just so you can't go and format your drive or something stupid like that). Good systems let you run multiple users at once.
But what about all the people who just go down and select *all* the software that's available on the CD, just in case they might use it some day? I used to be one of those..
..this is the one movie I absolutely do not want to see this year. I can't wait to go read the The Filthy Critic's review of this one (can you say one finger?)!
There is also this kind of equilibrium in the network television industry. Of course it's a lot easier to get people to watch your ads on telivision, but they don't play ads in an overly-intrusive way. This is why in some ways consolidation of the major content providers would be good for the web: there are only five or six network tv stations in any given area (besides cable or satelite); with fewer content providers, they wouldn't be so strapped for viewership and ads would become much less intrusive.
Perhaps the content providers that are too obtrusive will be the first ones to go.
..except for the ones which crash your system or leave you unable to login, of course...;-)
Fortunately, in a year or two of doing this, that's only happpened once (when the PAM maintainer mis-packaged some libs - whoops!). And, (props to the debian people), it seems like in the past months even the bugs that cause the update to fail have been rare.
Most likely he's talking about the service that many DNS hosting services provide to automatically redirect www.foo.com to anyplace, like www.foo.com:8080 or www.geocities.com/~userpages/whatever.html.
I update my Debian unstable daily. Therefore I can expect and assume that my system is free of nearly every known bug, because the Debian maintainers work very hard to incoporate security fixes as soon as possible.
On the other hand, Microsoft may provide patches, but they do not provide them in a place that's accessible to the average user. Of course there is Windows Update, which usually has fixes to the more publicized bugs, but it also usually doesn't have fixes for IIS or Outlook, since those are separate products from Windows (I guess).
Therefore Windows users are much less likely to update, even if the patches are available. And the other problem you pointed out.
The problem you pointed out - that new CDs often don't include new patches - only compounds things. If I buy a new Linux CD, I expect that it will have the latest versions of all of its software. I *expect* the same thing from Microsoft, but obviously that's not what really happens.
Use debian unstable, which I've been using at work and at home with hardly any problems. It's really not unstable at all. With that, the release cycle is every six hours or so:)
When the pundits come on, it is not necessarily the time to turn off the tube and go online to read about people's personal experiences. This is more than a story of brave firemen and watching relatives sob over their loved ones - it is as much a political story as anything else. One thing that the pundits do actually achieve is to tell the political story (if only from one side).
The net is useful, but mostly because you can visit pages of political activists from all sides of the picture. While I have sympathy, I can only take so much of the network's sob stories when there is so much more involved.
Even two objects as small as subatomic particles would form a black hole if they were squeezed into an extremely small space. That, however, would require the energy of a particle accelerator the size of a galaxy, something that would never get through Congress.
I should hope not... even appropriations in the name of science have limits, especially considering the recent lack of such appropriations for even small projects.
Part of the problem is that no one respects an Arab who is also willing to give his life for his cause.
It's not like America didn't do anything to provoke the attack (although I'm certainly not saying it was justified). I keep hearing young kids on the local news saying, "What did we do to them? Why do we deserve this?"
But it's war now. Everyone has a cause. So you are a hypocrit in a way... it's too bad that 99% of people (including me) will never hear the full story from all sides.
I have had @Home in Seattle since March, and I was never blocked on port 80. I've been running a personal web server, for the purposes of accessing my home box from work (with appropriate security measures of course) without interruption for several months. Does anyone know why my account apparantly was uneffected?
Re:Not this stupid 'programming is art' BS again!
on
Software Aesthetics
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· Score: 1
Slashdot Mirror
What, and everybody uses internet time in everyday life?
Here in Washington State, our state constitution forbids any bill that has more than one subject. Two recent very controversial bills here were revoked in the past few years (with a total of 4 subjects). This restriction has been a huge help to the sanity of the government here (the bills were not only in blatant violation of that aspect of the constition, but were extremely anti-tax and would have effectively crippled the government had they remained in effect).
KDE has got all the basics down
Personally, I prefer Gnome because, despite a lack of some of the "basics", it is much more customizable to my needs. For example, in KDE, I can't rearrange the key mappings to launch a terminal when I press C-A-t. Also, despite what a lot of people claim, KDE is still very much more unstable than Gnome - the panel dissappeared on me twice last time I started a KDE session, and I had to log out to restore it.
Sorry to bitch, but it just seems like while KDE is generally a lot prettier than others, some of the advanced "basics" - the basics that I, as a person who runs Linux and a power user - expect are not there yet. It's too much like Windows or Mac for my taste: it looks pretty and tries to do everything for you.
I carry mine, but it's not exactly a high tech card or anything. Mine's just a peice of thick paper - it doesn't even have a watermark on it.
You're absolutely right that it will not *stop* crime from happening - there is no way anything the government does is going to stop someone from robbing a bank unless they have some kind of electric field around the bank that reads the ID cards shocks any felons who try to enter. But, theoretically at least, this *would* help them track the criminals when they renew their drivers license or go through a border crossing, or any other time like that.
I don't have a problem with the idea of a national ID card. If you want privacy, then you're pretty much out of luck in the US because, like previous posters have pointed out, every time you go to a bank, show your drivers license, or use a credit card, or even every time you sign on to your MSN or AOL, somebody somewhere is tracking you.
The problem I have is that, considering that there is nothing stopping the government from keeping tight tabs on anyone and everyone using current technology/infrustructure, why do we need to go through the extra trouble, time, and money to implemenent a whole new card? Why can't they just use the existing state ID card, Social Security, or passport databases?
"Impulse drive", eh? These mindstorms are more advanced than I thought...
You're right, and I believe for "nearer" objects, like those within our own galaxy, astronomers mostly use a technique where they measure the angle of the object in the sky twice - one half year apart so that, since we know the size of the earth's orbit, they can basically use the pathagorean theorum and calculate the distance.
:).
Again, IANAAstronomer (which is probably why I can't even recall the name of that technique
Who says those are necessary to support the big bang? Aspects of quantum mechanics and all sorts of other phenomena, not to mention the effort to marry Relativity and Quantum mechanics, require a new "whacky" theory.
It is by observing the doplar shift, or "red shift", in the wavelength of a stars light that the length to almost every distant object is measured.
Think of yourself as being on the surface of an expanding baloon: relative to other objects that are close to you on the surface, you are moving very slowly. Relative to objects at the center of the baloon or halfway around the surface, you are moving a little faster (remember this is as the crow flies). Relative to objects clear on the other side of the baloon, you are moving the fastest of all.
On the scale of the universe, objects on the other side of the galaxy are moving extremely fast (relative to you). I'm not sure exactly how fast, but I remember reading somewhere that it is getting close to the speed of light (after all, they have had to cover a huge amount of space to get so far away). This is easily fast enough to have an affect on the wavelength of the light - even a small relative speed will have a small (but probably unmeasurable affect).
IANAAstroPhysicist, so whether this explains the visibly red shift (since scientific spectrographs are much more sensitive than our eyes ), I cannot say. Another explaination might be that the stars are young and therefore cool, but I couldn't say that for sure either.
i suppose capitalization goes away as time goes by, too, but that wasn't covered in my linguistics elective.
Kind of like "Internet" -> "internet". MS Word (ugh) always puts that little red underline if I don't capilalize.
Before I moved on to a full time job, I used to administer my highschool's network in my free time (yes I was a major nerd). We had one PII 400 running Linux and the network for 1700 people, samba shares used by 200 computers in classrooms and such, email accounts used by all the teachers, and free PHP webspace for anyone who wanted it. All this and it never hiccupped.
Then when a the motherboard failed (ouch), we had to move the whole server to a Pentium 200 with 96MB RAM, and it still worked fine.
The year after I graduated, the Seattle school district took over network ops and installed 4 monster NT machines to do the same job, minus the free email (which is handled by another server farm off-site) and the webspace (too much liability). Downtime: probably 25% (I still talk to friends who go there). Whereas my Linux box had an uptime of 135 days at one point before the hardware failure.
Bottom line, scoff at all the admins here at my new job that want NT everywhere. It doesn't work! The thing is that it's usually easier to get a basic system running NT than with Linux, but getting a real system working properly is much harder.
You're right - but a good system still has multiple users and you still should run your everyday apps in an unprivilaged mode (just so you can't go and format your drive or something stupid like that). Good systems let you run multiple users at once.
But what about all the people who just go down and select *all* the software that's available on the CD, just in case they might use it some day? I used to be one of those..
..this is the one movie I absolutely do not want to see this year. I can't wait to go read the The Filthy Critic's review of this one (can you say one finger?)!
There is also this kind of equilibrium in the network television industry. Of course it's a lot easier to get people to watch your ads on telivision, but they don't play ads in an overly-intrusive way. This is why in some ways consolidation of the major content providers would be good for the web: there are only five or six network tv stations in any given area (besides cable or satelite); with fewer content providers, they wouldn't be so strapped for viewership and ads would become much less intrusive.
Perhaps the content providers that are too obtrusive will be the first ones to go.
Fortunately, in a year or two of doing this, that's only happpened once (when the PAM maintainer mis-packaged some libs - whoops!). And, (props to the debian people), it seems like in the past months even the bugs that cause the update to fail have been rare.
Most likely he's talking about the service that many DNS hosting services provide to automatically redirect www.foo.com to anyplace, like www.foo.com:8080 or www.geocities.com/~userpages/whatever.html.
I update my Debian unstable daily. Therefore I can expect and assume that my system is free of nearly every known bug, because the Debian maintainers work very hard to incoporate security fixes as soon as possible.
On the other hand, Microsoft may provide patches, but they do not provide them in a place that's accessible to the average user. Of course there is Windows Update, which usually has fixes to the more publicized bugs, but it also usually doesn't have fixes for IIS or Outlook, since those are separate products from Windows (I guess).
Therefore Windows users are much less likely to update, even if the patches are available. And the other problem you pointed out.
The problem you pointed out - that new CDs often don't include new patches - only compounds things. If I buy a new Linux CD, I expect that it will have the latest versions of all of its software. I *expect* the same thing from Microsoft, but obviously that's not what really happens.
Use debian unstable, which I've been using at work and at home with hardly any problems. It's really not unstable at all. With that, the release cycle is every six hours or so :)
When the pundits come on, it is not necessarily the time to turn off the tube and go online to read about people's personal experiences. This is more than a story of brave firemen and watching relatives sob over their loved ones - it is as much a political story as anything else. One thing that the pundits do actually achieve is to tell the political story (if only from one side).
The net is useful, but mostly because you can visit pages of political activists from all sides of the picture. While I have sympathy, I can only take so much of the network's sob stories when there is so much more involved.
Even two objects as small as subatomic particles would form a black hole if they were squeezed into an extremely small space. That, however, would require the energy of a particle accelerator the size of a galaxy, something that would never get through Congress.
I should hope not... even appropriations in the name of science have limits, especially considering the recent lack of such appropriations for even small projects.
Part of the problem is that no one respects an Arab who is also willing to give his life for his cause.
It's not like America didn't do anything to provoke the attack (although I'm certainly not saying it was justified). I keep hearing young kids on the local news saying, "What did we do to them? Why do we deserve this?"
But it's war now. Everyone has a cause. So you are a hypocrit in a way... it's too bad that 99% of people (including me) will never hear the full story from all sides.
This is offtopic, but I wish you luck on that flight...
I have had @Home in Seattle since March, and I was never blocked on port 80. I've been running a personal web server, for the purposes of accessing my home box from work (with appropriate security measures of course) without interruption for several months. Does anyone know why my account apparantly was uneffected?
(And I've seen some very ugly cabinets too.)